- I'm gonna teach you syncopation today. That's what we're talking about. Your piano teacher, Tim, here. Before we begin, make sure
that you are subscribed and you have all notifications turned on because we have new lessons
coming out all the time. You don't wanna miss a beat. Let's get on to the lesson. (upbeat piano music) Okay, let's lay some groundwork here to understand exactly what syncopation is. Before we do that, you need to understand about accents in measures,
and there's natural accents that occur, and this is how it works. So we are in 4/4, and we
have four quarter notes to fill out the whole measure, remember that a quarter
note just gets one beat, so you can have one, and then the next one's two, three, four. Hopefully, you are following along so far. So the natural accents of the
beats, and what I mean by that is just basically where the
notes are hitting the strongest. They occur on beats one,
two, three, and four. Pretty easy, right? (simple piano music) One, two, three, four. So that's all you gotta know about that. The only other thing that
I'm going to kind of stress a little bit is, and it's
not super relevant to today, but you should know that the
first accent is the strongest, and the third accent is
the second strongest, and then two and four are weaker accents. Now, if you didn't get
all that, don't worry, just keep in mind that there's an accent on each of the four
beats and you'll do OK, but just keep in mind that,
at least that number one is the strongest beat. Let me show you in 3/4. Okay, so now, we are
in 3/4 time signature, so the question I have for you is where are the natural
accents in this measure? Well, just like 4/4, they occur on beats one, two, and three, and then, of course, we don't have another beat over there, so just keep in mind that like, when you're playing a song in 3/4, for the most part, a lot of the emphasis, or beats one, two, and three
will be hit a little bit harder than the other ones. That's all you gotta know about that, but you're gonna see why you
need to know that right now. So this is where syncopation comes in because if you have accents on beats one, two, three, and four,
well, what happens, say, when we get rid of this beat? What happens? Well, let's take a look. Okay, syncopation is actually what occurs when we get rid of that first
beat or any of the beats, and we shift over the
accent over to something that isn't one of the beats, so let's chart out our rhythm here, and I'm gonna do this on the bottom. So you have one that's gonna
be an eighth rest there. So this is gonna be
and, two and, three and, and if you don't get this stuff,
or how to count these out, I'll include a link for
you once the lesson is up, but here we go, so now, we don't
have an accent on beat one. It's instead on what we call
the and of beat one, so now, it occurs on the and of beat one instead of four straight beats, one, two, three, four, you now have one, and two, three, four,
one and two, three, four. Notice how it has almost like, a tiny bit of a shuffle now to it. Bum bum, bum, bum, bum bum, bum, bum. Just like that, and you can
shift off any of the other beats in the measure, as well. Let me show you an example of that. Okay, another measure of 4/4. We still have beat one,
so that means our accent, or, by the way, that's an eighth rest, so this is gonna take up and two. I'll just chart out all
the beats, and three, oh, look at what's happening, right? All of our quarter notes, the notes that we're gonna be hitting on, the notes that are the strongest,
aka what are they called? They're called the accented beats. They are now on the ands
of each beat, so therefore, we've actually displaced
all of the notes here in this measure, so this is a fully, I guess you could call it,
a fully syncopated measure. I'm not sure if that's
a term or not, but here, it's going to be played like this. One, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and
three, and four, and-- (simple piano music) So you can spot syncopation immediately if the measure begins with an eighth rest, you know, you can spot that out. If there are other eighth
rests within the measure that take the place of
one of the four beats, or however many beats you have, you know right away that you're
dealing with syncopation. So let me just kind of write
out a tiny example here, and I'll, you have to let me know whether you think it's syncopation or not based on what I just said. (electronic bells chime) Okay, syncopated or not syncopated? Well, it begins with
a quarter note, right? So so far, it doesn't
look like it's syncopated, but there you go. We're gonna try out the rhythm here. We have one, and two, so two, remember, there's supposed to be an accent on two, and there's a rest instead, and I said that if it happened
on any of the numbers, not the ands, but the numbers, that you're probably dealing
with some sort of syncopation because this will hit on the
and of two, hit over for three, and you have and four, and then and, so see how the notes
actually occur on the ands, the plus signs, and not so
much the numbers themselves, even though the first one
does occur on the first beat. The rest of these are,
there's syncopation involved. Okay, question for you. Is this measure syncopated? Well, you probably did see
an eighth rest in there, so it could be, but let's double check. You always have to double check. So we have beat one here. Let's just chart out the
four beats that we have, make things easy. So you have beat one
here, two, three, four, and then I'll just say the ands here, here, here, and then here. Now, here's the thing is,
for each of these four beats, you wanna look at the
number one, the number two, the number three, and the number four, and you ask yourself one question. Are there notes underneath those beats? And there are, so there's
a note hitting there. There's a note hitting
there, there, and there, so it's not syncopated. You just have an eighth
note and then an eighth rest and then the rest, you know,
is just straight rhythm, for the most part, for all of
it, so you don't have notes. Well, and if you do have notes,
also hitting on the ands, the plus signs, that's okay. That doesn't necessarily
mean you have syncopation, but if all of them only occur on those, then you are dealing with
syncopation, so remember, if they fall on the numbers, there's a note below each of the numbers, it's not syncopated. At least, not in the type
we're talking about right now. If it hits on an and, or like,
another half of the measure, but not the numbers. It's all about, actually, the numbers. If they hit on the
numbers, not syncopated. If they don't hit on
the numbers, syncopated. So think about it like that. I think that's the simplest way. All right, there are more
types of syncopation, and ways to do it. Let's take a look. Okay, we have two measures
just filled with quarter notes. Pretty easy to understand. You have one, two, three,
four, one, two, three, four. Now, you see something
different about this? There's a tie over between each of these. This is called a suspended syncopation, whereas the other one was
called an off-beat syncopation, which is why the notes
occurred on the off-beats, rather than the on-beats. So here we go. So let's see what happens here. The thing to consider now
is because we have this tie, what we're doing is, we're essentially tying
together these two beats. It's like if you had a
half note in between there. So here's the thing though, is because you are holding over from beat four over to beat
one, well, what happens? Well, let's take a look. So you have an accent here. By the way, this little Pac
Man symbol is the accent. Should've mentioned that in the beginning, but you probably get the idea. So here's the thing. You hit beat four there,
but the problem is, is because you're holding this over, you're actually not
hitting again on beat one, so therefore, you have displaced the beat, and then you can have
beats two, three, and four, so there is a little bit of
syncopation going on there. It's a very boring type
of syncopation, but yeah, so here you go. You've got one, two, three,
four, one, two, three, four. You could hear that as I was holding over from four, one, two. You could really hear that
accent then on beat two, so that displaced the beat,
therefore, it is a syncopation, so watch out for ties. It doesn't necessarily automatically mean if there is a tie that
there's syncopation. You'll have to chart out the beat, see if any of the beats
are being held over, or something like that, but be on the lookout for
the suspended syncopation. (electronic bells chime) All right, there's another
one I'm gonna show you. Let's take a look. Okay, this type of syncopation
occurs in 3/4 time, and let's just chart out
a simple rhythm here. Okay, so here, we have a measure of 3/4 with all quarter notes. You have beats, obviously,
one, two, and three, so you have an accent, one, two, three. Now, remember what I said towards the beginning of the lesson with the different weighted accents? I mentioned really quick
that the first accent occurs, the first one in the
beginning of the measure, first beat is the strongest accent, so we're going to write
that, so here's an accent. That one's the strong one. Then, you have a weak one, and then three is
another like, weaker one. So one, two, three, one, two, three. The accents rhythmically are placed there even if an accent isn't written, and it really helps move
the piece along, in a way, so when you are playing your pieces, you do wanna leave a slight attack, like, the first beat of each
measure slightly more, so we have our strong beat on beat one, and then two and three are weaker ones, but what happens if we do this? We put a strong one, that
means strong because it's bold, and what about a weaker
one here on beat one? So you have one, two,
three, one, two, three, instead of one, two,
three, one, two three, you have one, two, three, one,
two, three, so in this case, we have not displaced any of the beats. We have a note on each of
the numbers, which is fine, however, this is still considered
an even note syncopation because we are actually
putting the emphasis on an even number, so if you are in 4/4, and you put accents on two and four, then that would be a type
of syncopation, as well. It just gives a different
drive to the beat, as you could hear when I
played it, so in your music, the way this would be written out is you actually wouldn't have accents here because it's already implied that beat one gets a strong accent. The other one does not. What you would see is an actual
accent written on beat two right there, so you'd have
an accent here on beat one, but a strong one on beat
two, and then three, and because you can see that
there's an accent placed by the composer, me,
here on the second beat, you can automatically kind
of assume that one and three, in this case, aren't as strong as two because two actually has
something, you know, written there to hit that stronger, so that's how you would find it if you were playing a sheet of music. (electronic bells chime) And, of course, as a piano player, you're gonna have to understand
a lot more about rhythm, so you're gonna wanna check
out this playlist right here. (bell dings) It's gonna give you some
really, really helpful tips on how to count different
rhythms, how to count properly. It's been your piano teacher, Tim, here. Thanks so much for coming today. I'll see you, yes you, in the next lesson. (upbeat piano music)
